Why do I need two browsers these days?

I agree that many pages do not work properly with one or other browser. often I have problems myself for personal use, usually with chrome ( after they have done an update) Before using add ons, be very sure you know what you are doing and using them for. As long as you understand that pages might stuff up with add ons installed then great.
I am a amateur web manager for a veteran society, I know nothing (much) of html and use a wysiwyg developer tool for design and editing of web pages and site structure. I do this for two sites. As I am fully aware of how badly some browsers stuff up or fail to render web pages correctly I have installed on both my computers IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, the 4 'main' browsers that people mainly use and I check each page before it goes live through each to make sure they work.
Because these days some web developers allow you to use any font, or utility you like to make your page. If I used say a font that was not web safe for a browser my page would look dreadful on a visitors page if they did not have the same font installed. The same with flash or shockwave, silverlight etc, if they aren't installed or updated on the viewers browser(s) then they wont work and will make the webpage behave incorrectly.
All in all the only way around webpages not working is to keep everything updated and use at least 2 that you are comfortable and familiar with, that way if something does go wrong you will be able to see if its the website the internet connection or your browser and its add ons/extensions. Dont always blame web page designers for flaws, most of us check and double check our work before releasing it to make sure it works.

Today there are far more options in browsers and functionality in each. That being said a web page designer will have preferences as to the features they want to offer on a web page. Some of these choices work well with one browser and break another. Back in the day when essentially two browsers were predominate IE and Netscape Navigator most web designers took one of two paths .. They either Offered a web page that was compatible with both or catered to one browser or the other. Most cases web designers offered compatibility to both. But then Netscape was somewhat crushed by IE and Microsoft ran into issues in Europe over IE being imbedded with the operating system. This left some with wanting alternatives to IE especially with the security issues surrounding IE. Today there are many options for browsers there is IE, but becoming more popular is Firefox and Chrome. Firefox pretty much uses the Netscape Navigator foundation and Chrome their own flavor of browser, all the browsers have many functions that are common but more and more plugins for these browsers are available and a variety of web pages favor one browser over another. Gone are the days of general compatibility simply because it has become difficult unless you are willing to have a plain vanilla web site. But not standing out against the competition can result in less traffic to your web page. I do not care to have to use multiple browsers but it has become a fact of life as browsers get far more sophisticated and the web offers so much more content than it used too. It is hard to make a web site compatible with every browser.

I used to need two different browser because of sloppy coding from the people in my company. And all that while in another division of our company we are teaching people how to code browser-independent websites.

The fact is that to use my email account to the fullest I should be using Google Chrome, because the company email system is Gmail. To be able to order goods or to even see my paycheck at the end of the month they want me to use Internet Explorer. In the end I started to use FireFox with IE tab as an add-on and all of the sudden I was able to do everything with one browser (with the exception of some fancu email tricks however).

I'm afraid one of these days another programmer will start coding specifically for yet another browser and then I'll be looking for yet another solution. But using two or more browsers? No, only if I'm the coding one and I want to check if everything works OK on all browsers I can find!

Kind regards,

Jean Pierre

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The problem "taint youse" ... the browser developers had parents that forgot to tell them that just because they can do something doesn't mean they have to.... the browser folks have forgotten their origins and the goals they had ... and have gone into this HUGE RACE to see who can create the biggest, fanciest, most complicated abortion possible... Website developers have their hands full ... it is the same on everything everywhere all the time.... and not only on browsers. 20 years ago, I would have told anyone who said I would be measuring in terms of Gigs with Terra coming down the road I would have told them they were nuts.

But I am just a customer / user and my opinion doesn't count cause I am a "dum yokle".

I wish they would answer my favorite question ... why is it that people think that they have to change what made them spectacularly successful once they become successful? Why is what they did to get there no longer any good?

I think one key issue at hand is that too many programmers -- or maybe art directors -- are more concerned about form over function. As end users, we really don't care anymore if something is beautiful -- such as a field or a form or whatever -- the web has been here for a while, and we just want it to work. You don't have to impress us any more. Sure, the initial page landing should be pretty. But when you get into forms and fields, cut out the fancy crap.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) does indeed have standards, and if developers -- NOT necessarily the browsers -- would stick to them, we'd all sing perfect harmony. The last time I checked, this was 2013. There is no excuse these days for any website on Earth to pop up a window that says "this website works only with Internet Explorer version X or higher; click here to upgrade." And as a side note, I find these messages appear on many government websites.

One way of summarizing your complaint is that all the browsers have many critical bugs. Companies end up not investing enough in products that don't bring direct profits. At least that seems to be the conclusion from the main arena where free products formed the mainstay for a long time.

Dear Joe A.:
Haven't you stopped for a minute to think that the problem may be with the developers of the Web sites you visit, rather than the browsers you use?
Why don't you take a short visit to my Web site and tell me which browser does not display it with flying colors?
But I concede that sometimes it seems that as software programs become more sophisticated they seem to contain more bugs. And I say that it seems because I have no means to reach an entirely objective conclusion, at this point, with respect to this aspect.
It would be interesting to discuss the theme: As computer programs become more sophisticated are they been launched in early stages and with a lot of flaws? Are these flaws impossible to correct due to the same sophistication of the program?
On the other hand we need to ponder the question: Is our hardware becoming obsolete?
I understand that we should continue the tradition of serious debate here and in many other forums, but if you allow me for a little joke, I would mildly suggest stopping persecutory (paranoid) dilutions and dig into the subject matter until finding the culprit, or the truth.
You are very well on your way!

Mostly, I use Firefox. I try to stay away from Chrome because it is dominated by Google. I want to have some say in what I 'have to' read. My problem comes when I have to get something off the net and the dog gone download button doesn't work. After saying what I think about that in four letter or less, I just copy the URL to IE. I'm not a great fan of IE, however, it has 'never' let me down when I do this. The URL works, and after I click the download button the download comes in. I was told a long time ago, this is due to the different 'engines' used by Firefox and IE to interpret what is needed at the time. Matter of fact this happened yesterday. It is an inconvenience but then what I downloaded was free anyway.
Peace.

I feel your pain, Joe. I will be so very blunt and in clear defiance of the majority of "modern" people. The internet has gotten absolutely ridiculous. Take one look at the page source of most sites and you will see literally millions of lines of code, just to give you eye candy, tons of little annoying pop up things and superfluous features. Try using an older computer to browse the web, lets say a 2GHz AMD Athlon XP with 2GB RAM. That should be beyond fast enough just to browse the web, but browsing is about like 56K dialup! Your CPU will max out at 100% while it loads the bloated new browsers, then max out again when you visit each web page! It's the internet for crying out loud! It's no load at all on my i7 Quad Core, but the page still takes forever to render when compared to the old days of IE6. That's because now, the browser has to churn through those millions of lines of code! And since there are millions of lines of code, human errors abound which make it all break, crash and burn in these different browsers. On top of that, the code is usually written by dozens of people and it all gets pieced together like some kind of internet Frankenstein.

Back when fast internet was new, during the IE6 days, things were near perfect...aside from IE6 crashing, lol. Pages were simple, effective, efficient, loaded fast and you could download large files quickly. Now, we have software and web pages that remind me of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Slow, cumbersome and a royal pain in the butt! Why everyone accepts this is beyond me. Sure some new features would be nice, but not when you have to sacrifice basic functionality! I'm sure a hook would sometimes be useful as a hand, but you won't see me chopping off my hand to get one! I have noticed a massive change in the way people think, as I'm sure some others have also noticed. The stuff we have today, no one would have tolerated even 10 years ago. There is a completely different way of thinking now, almost child like. There used to be logical engineering to the software design, like with all of the old versions of Windows, up to and including XP. Now, it's like everything is written for "Dummies", in some child like way where nothing makes any sense. This same thing has infected the internet, turning it into some massive bloated code creature of doom.

Honestly, I think technology has gotten way out of hand and is consuming every aspect of our lives. Thus creating some kind of technologically autistic society that doesn't even realize what has happened to it. I steer clear of most new things, which is perhaps why I still see things with those old 2000 era glasses. You won't find me online while away from the house, no cell phone, very few portable devices (like my good old, reliable MP3 player with actual buttons! whoa!) and I'm not sucked into the social networking fantasy world that so many people live in now. Perhaps more people would see just how insane things have gotten if they disconnected for a while. Sadly, I think the majority of people would go insane themselves without their little crutch devices. Everything needs to have a limit. You can't just take everything to infinity and expect there to be no consequences for doing so.

I too have seen this in many places. In some instances, it is the fault of the site developers not adopting the latest standards or maybe not using them properly. Other times, it could be that the browser you are using at the time still does not support some part of HTML5 that is in use on that page. There are many places you can go to see how browsers stack up. One I have used recently is http://html5test.com/. You can see how your current browser stacks up as well as see how other browsers are doing and look at a comparison of up to 3 modern browsers.

This isn't going to be the only reason that this happens, but I'm betting that it has a good deal to do with it.

It doesn't hurt, and isn't that much trouble, to run more than one browser. My preference is for Mozilla, because of the free open source model and I'm used to the way it works. I always keep a current copy of IE under my Windows operating systems. Microsoft still does everything they legally can (and probably some things they can't) to make it more difficult to use other browsers to get updates, etc. (or at least easier to use IE). Once in a while I have Chrome installed, because it's adherents praise it so highly as a slick and efficient browser, but I could never wrap my head around the way it works.

""Browser Chauvinism" (particularly MSIE chauvinism) is much less common than it used to be. Web developers are supposed to test their pages in all popular browsers. Once in a while you still run into a site that says "best viewed in ...". Also you may find that despite the update channels and default plug-ins that are supposed to be universal some things just don't display properly. For example, for the longest time math articles in Wikipedia--which use a Web form of the Latex mark-up language--would not display properly for me in Firefox, but worked fine in IE--until I did the research and installed the plug-in I needed. These days I think it just works. For a long time Netflix, which uses MS Silverlight for digital rights management, only worked with IE. These days it does work with Firefox but not AFAIK under Linux (except various Linux-based appliances like Roku).

To me, since browsers are mostly free and easy to download and install, it's not that big a deal. I just register Firefox as my default.

Great question, but too many post with totally irrelevant answers. Reading forums are another chore people have to endure these days because of irrelevant posts. I wish there is a way to just filter out relevant responses to a post. Some day soon I hope.

Joe,

You raise a valid point regarding browsers, there are many reasons why each browser behaves differently. With HTML 4.01 giving way to the new standard HTML 5 sometime next year, more and more browser companies try to implement these changes now. Most browsers release not just security updates but functionality updates every month and as they do, the developers for many websites try and ensure that the website continues to work throughout all browsers, however not all websites have a full time developer. They pay to have it done and it works wonderfully when completed and the contract ends, leaving you as the end user to deal with the quirks that arise as the browser changes.

Hopefully when the new standard becomes the only standard you will see more and more of these problems disappear as long as you stay away from IE. IE is the worst when it comes to adhering to standards in a reasonable amount of time due to Microsoft's policy of only releasing certain browsers for certain operating systems and then allowing their operating systems to operate for an insanely long time. XP was released around 2000 yet it's end of life is not until April 2014 yet Internet Explorer 8 is the highest browser that can be used on XP.

The second issue is a vast majority of websites use templates instead of paying someone else to design, develop and maintain their websites. Company A buys a template that was designed in 2008 is most definitely going to run into issues with today's modern browsers because the technology driving that website in 2008 is definitely very different than it is today. The backend software, that you as the end user rarely even notices is there, gets upgraded and removes functionality A that your template relied on and replaced it functionality B will cause exactly the type of issues you are describing. Some browsers continue to contain functionality A information for a while after yet others remove support almost immediately but eventually it will all break down.

The third issue is you compare Firefox and Chrome. As an end user you just know they are browsers and they work or they don't but using the two you have mentioned they have very different engines that their code is built on. Firefox is built and coded around the Mozilla engine which is based off the old Netscape browser. Chrome is built and coded around the webkit engine which is quite different. This alone can cause some issues in the rendering of a webpage but again that falls more to the developer who should code the website around these differences.

There is a governing body who oversees web standards and require browsers to adhere to those standards and for the most part your browser does. But keep in mind from the different engines that browsers are coded for and then the multitude of themed web sites and developers who lack the skills to code websites to adhere to every browser for implementation all together is what causes one browser to behave differently from another. These are just some of the issues that cause the end user to get frustrated when surfing the net but should give you a general idea of why.

If you hate ads and intrusiveness add an ad blocker to your browser. Adblock Plus offers their blocking for most major browsers and it is free. You can determine just how much of your information is stored in a web site's cookie by changing your browser's security preferences. As for Chrome trying to access your CreateSpace constantly you can check for a browser addon that is asking for it, or double check Chrome's settings to ensure that somewhere there is not a setting that has been turned on for it. I have had this happen in the past and discovered it was more the program than Chrome's fault by supplementing a browser addon that is activated without asking the user.

I think the main reason you need more than one is because IE is so damn slow and firefox and chrome work much faster, but niether one will work without IE installed. They both use parts of it to make them work.
Next there is the problem of who designed the site. Some sites, mostly government sites or sites run by companies with government contracts, have forms which only work on IE. I haven't checked this recently but it was that way a couple of years ago. They even said this on their sites.
As for me, I use firefox, chrome and comodo dragon which is a chrome based browserand only use IE when I have to.
I have had a lot of people think they needed a new, better computer because of their internet being so slow and they couldn't open some sites. Most have been fixed by installing chrome and clearing out 5-10 gig of old data with ccleaner. CCleaner is free right here on CNET

google is clever, the seem like their are pro open but they are very anti competetive, has anyone noticed that they want you to enter your password and keep it for you all the time, this should stop

they have also buried gmail in the new interface for google page

i suggest DuckDuckGo

we need a movement towards all companies embracing web stanrds, developers have a torrid time, its like muted browsers wars of the early 1990's